


a kindness you have done me

by meanstoflourish



Category: The Haunting of Bly Manor (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-14
Updated: 2020-11-14
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:53:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27556390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meanstoflourish/pseuds/meanstoflourish
Summary: “I can feel you holding your breath,” Dani says, her arms around her as they drift off to sleep.And it’s true. Jamie’s holding her breath—she’s been holding her breath for twenty years.
Relationships: Dani Clayton/Jamie
Comments: 34
Kudos: 291





	a kindness you have done me

Moonlight drifts in through the window. 

The room doesn’t smell like sex, because it’s massive. (Jamie could fit most of her flat in here.) It actually smells like roses, from Dani’s shampoo. Her very own flower, she could think, if she was into corny shite like that.

“I...that was…” Dani doesn’t say more, but she tightens her arms around her. The sweat is drying off both their bodies, and it should feel uncomfortable, but it doesn’t. 

“Yeah,” she confirms. She isn’t quite sure how she ended up here, with the american au-pair positively spooning her from behind, but she’s okay with it. She doesn’t really want to look at her right now. Feels too raw. 

By this point, she would’ve already gotten dressed and left. Instead, Dani is holding her in a way that makes her feel breakable. 

“I can feel you holding your breath,” Dani says, her voice faint as though she’s drifting off to sleep.

The words disarm her. 

Jamie tries not to think about it, but it’s true. She’s holding her breath—because Dani is holding her, Dani is not letting her go, Dani had listened to her unload a lifetime worth of crap on her and had still kissed her afterward, had still led her to her bedroom and...well. 

She’s holding her breath—she’s been holding her breath for twenty years.

The thing is, she’d told Dani the facts, what she needed to know to decide if she was worth the trouble, but she hadn’t said how she felt. She wasn’t as good with that. 

In 1967 her mum leaves, she tells Dani as much, but what she doesn’t say is that she’s only eight years old, more bruise than girl. She doesn’t tell her that she cries every time they push her at school, that she feels ashamed of the words they throw at her that she’s too young to understand, that her only respite from it all is getting rocked to sleep in the arms of her mother when she deems her worthy of her attention—and then one day, even that is gone. 

She is nine years old when they take her, and she doesn’t remember turning nine, knows the day passed her by because she was too busy playing mummy. She tells Dani about the accident, but doesn’t mention the way it hurt, how it felt like the skin was melting off her back, how she tried to shield Mikey and took the brunt of it. 

She doesn’t tell her she’s twelve when she has her first cigarette, and by thirteen she’s stealing them from whichever fat, bald pervert is watching over her during the day, and trying to sneak into her bedroom at night. She doesn’t mention the sock where she stored loose tobacco, or how proud she was off herself for learning to roll ‘em by herself.

She tells her she leaves, but what she means is that she’s fourteen-almost-fifteen when she runs away. One morning, she packs up her meager belongings into a school bag and off to London she goes. If they even look for her, she doesn’t know, but she never sees any of the foster parents or the sad, ragged case workers again. She couch surfs, and pretends to be older than she is, cooler than she is. Soon enough, it becomes so entrenched in the way she carries herself in the world that it stops feeling like an act, and becomes second nature. Becomes her nature, period.

She learns to be funny, funny enough to keep people entertained, to make them want to keep her around. It’s a survival skill, like anything else. You catch more flies with sugar, she learns, and soon enough she has a disarming grin and a quick wit to match it. People like her, because she makes herself easy to like. 

Years pass, as if in a trance. There’s boys who want her, and who she doesn’t want back. Then there’s girls who she does want, and she’s quick to embrace that bit of herself with a defiant grin. She owes the world nothing, and it doesn’t owe her anything in return. There’s women then, lovers. There’s drugs, for a bit, until she leaves that girlfriend. There’s the stealing, and she can’t help that. She never bothered to finish school, and there’s nothing much she knows how to do apart from running, so she nicks shit from unsuspecting hands and walks out of grocery stores wearing bulky coats filled with survival. 

She’s angry at the world, but isn’t quite sure how to hurt it. But that hardly matters. She’s free, and clever, and always quick on her feet. 

Until she isn’t. 

She has it on good authority that the owner of the shop is an arse, and he has it coming. The days are getting colder, and the flat where she’s hunkering down with four other girls is going to be hell come winter unless they can afford the heat. She helps out at a shop, gets paid under the table, and it’s not enough. One of her friends sells her own body, and she’d never do that. She’s running out of options. 

Besides, it’s supposed to be an easy thing, in and out, and the gun is just for show. Except, she doesn’t know it’s loaded. Except, she doesn’t know her jeans are going to get caught on a fence as she runs away from the shop.

The shot rings out, loud, the shot that the other kid, Tommy, wasn’t meant to shoot at all. 

She gets caught, only her. And the bloke makes it, which helps her, and the gun wasn’t in her hand, which helps her, but it’s not looking good. 

And then, the kicker. 

She turns eighteen before her case makes it to court. 

Jamie gets tried as an adult, gets sentenced as an adult. She cries the night before they transfer her to prison, and then never does it again through the grueling five years that follow. 

She gets out at twenty-two, and she’s tired. She’s already lived a long, tough life, experienced more than most people do their entire fucking existences. She’s still young, a kid, really. But she’s fucking tired. 

It’s a no brainer to move away from the city, away from trouble. She finished school inside, which helps her. She does odd jobs, here and there. Works at a mechanic shop for a bit. Works at a Christmas Tree Farm of all places the winter after she gets out, and realizes chopping living things down is the exact opposite of what she wants to do with her life. The holiday season gets to her. She thinks about looking up her brothers, and doesn’t.

It’s been so long without them she doesn’t even remember what being a sister feels like, so there’s no point. They’re better off without her. 

It gets cold then, and she gets lonely. And oh, she’s familiar with that feeling. She tries to cover it up with potted plants in her flat and women in her bed, but it hardly makes a dent in it. Her heater is shoddy and her plants die, and the women always leave before she wakes. 

Solitude embraces her like an old friend she’s never had. 

It’s been two years of drifting when she gets word of the position at the old Manor on the outskirts of Bly, and applies, not really expecting anything to come off it. 

She never expects anything. That is the mother of all disappointment, she’d been quick to learn. Can’t expect your mother to be a proper mother, or your father to step up to the challenge, can’t expect the grown ups tasked with caring for you to not be sleeazes, can’t expect the girls that take you under their wing to actually care, or expect your so called friends to help you instead of letting you get caught by cops before running away like rats. 

She doesn’t expect anything, certainly not to be offered the job at the manor, even though she’s a convict and they know it, even though they must smell the cigarette smoke in her hair and they’ve got two little kids. 

She moves to a small flat above the local pub, sells her old car to get a jeep more suited to the proper countryside, and settles down. 

She had a good,  _ solid _ four years at the manor before the blond menace now holding her arrived.

She had found friends in Hanna and Owen, had found a purpose in caring for the grounds, had built Lady Wingrave a Greenhouse from scratch—and made good money too. This life was already more than she thought she’d get, back when she slept with one eye open in fear somebody would rip her innocence from her before she had a chance to give it away willingly.

More than she dared dreamed off when she drifted off to sleep in strangers' couches, or woke up behind prison bars. 

This life was  _ enough _ . 

“You smell nice,” Dani mutters, getting even closer to her, floating somewhere between asleep and awake. 

And fuck, it makes her smile. 

And that’s dangerous—Dani already feels indispensable. She’s the first person her eyes look for when she enters a room, who her thoughts drift away to when she’s watering her plants. It’s been years since she felt like this about someone, and she’s never been so consumed by it, not ever. 

She said enough, she gave her the gist of it, but there’s still so much more that Dani doesn’t know, so much that has the potential to send the sweet—too sweet, too kind, too cotton candy pink—woman running. Too much shit she doesn’t deserve after everything she’s been through. 

And how does she even say it? What she knows to be true about herself deep down?

_ Yes, I’m holding my breath, because ever since I was a little kid I learned this feeling doesn’t last. You make me feel safe, Poppins. I feel invincible when you look at me.  _

How can she say it out loud?

_ I don’t understand why anyone in their right mind would choose me. I don’t have anything to give, I’ve got nothing to offer.  _

_ I don’t know why anyone would want to stay with me.  _

_ I’m scared that I might be half in love with you already.  _

“Jamie?” Dani asks, her voice clearer. Like she pulled her from the shores of sleep with nothing but the force of her unruly thoughts. “Are you always so...tense? Did I...did I do something wrong?”

This woman, God.

“What? ‘Course not. Thought I made that clear.”

Dani giggles, and it’s this airy, breathy sound. If Jamie was in her right mind, she’d find it grating. Dani’s got a stupid laugh. But instead it makes her stomach flip, and her chest feel tight, and all she wants is to hear more of it. She’s truly well fucked. 

Dani kisses her shoulder, right above the thickened skin of a twenty year old scar.

“Okay,” she concedes, and seems to slip away once more. “G’night, Jamie.”

She nuzzles into her shoulder then, like she’s something precious. Something deserving of care. 

And Jamie...She’s never felt she was, not until now. 

“‘Night, Poppins,” she says, hoping her voice doesn’t betray how tight her throat feels. 

It’s tight from years worth of pain, of not being picked first, of not being protected over and over until she learned to protect herself by not letting anyone close enough to hurt her in the first place. Her whole chest has felt this way since she was a wee little thing, since her mum walked out when she wasn’t even tall enough to reach the stove. 

Dani is right, it’s like she’s been holding her breath the whole time, keeping her head under the water.

She’s twenty-eight years old when she finally comes up for air.

**Author's Note:**

> So I word vomited this in an hour and might hate it in the morning, but I had a lot of feelings about how Jamie's snark and attitude (while incredibly hot) are a defense mechanism and this came out of that. I'm so interested in her backstory and think miss Amelia Eve is a genius for coming up with it, and I definitely want to do a proper fic about her life before Bly at some point. 
> 
> This is my first Damie fic (that I've posted) so I'm still trying to find Jamie's voice, and english isn't my first language which makes nailing the accent twice as hard, but I gave it my best shot. I'd love to hear your thoughts!


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